BARONESS Thatcher shook the Conservative Party last night with a withering attack on those of its "One Nation" tradition, and a trenchant rejection of Euro, federalism and the proposed single currency.
Fanning the flames of Tory warfare, Lady Thatcher declared Britain's laws, Parliament, and freedom "now in peril". And she suggested "One Nation Conservatism" a concept embraced by Mr John Major might be better described as "No Nation Conservatism".
In an outspoken defence of "the basic Conservative principles which prevailed in the 1980s", Lady Thatcher carried the battle to the party's left, warning against any move towards the centre ground of politics. She dismissed as "baloney" suggestions that Mr Major's troubles resulted from a shift to the right. And she berated his government for effectively failing Britain's middle classes.
Mrs Thatcher was giving the Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture at the Tory party's Centre for Policy Studies in London. In a wounding passage likely to find a resonance in the Tory heart lands Lady Thatcher told her audience "The Conservative Party today has problems not because our analysis has been wrong or our principles faulty. Our difficulties are due to the fact that in certain limited but important respects, our policies and performance have not lived up to our analysis and principles."
The government was unpopular, she said, "above all because the middle classes and all those who aspire to join the middle classes feel that they no longer have the incentives and opportunities they expect from a Conservative government.
Lady Thatcher said it was "no secret" that she and Mr Major had had differences, though she insisted these had always been about how to achieve objectives rather than about what those objectives should be. However, her endorsement of her successor was at best perfunctory. And the linking of her European onslaught with an attack on "New Labour" did little to disguise the true object of her wrath.
With the party already reeling from the latest back bench defection from the centre left, ministers had desperately hoped Lady Thatcher's lecture would be marked by a warm endorsement of her successor and a sustained attack on Mr Tony Blair.
But while Lady Thatcher warned that Britons would be taking "a large gamble" in supposing Mr Blair could control his party in government, she said she would emulate the late Sir Keith's example and cast no doubts on the Opposition leader's motives. And she had conspicuously warm words for Mr Michael Portillo, Mr John Redwood, and Mr Michael Howard three of the four originally identified as Mr Major's cabinet "bastards"
Lady Thatcher said it was nob surprise to her, as "someone who always recognised the socialist destination of this Euro federalist dream", that the Labour Party should welcome it all so warmly. But her real target was unmistakable as she endorsed Mr Portillo's opposition to proposals for common European defence and echoed Mr Redwood's view that the single currency "would be a major step on the way to a single European nation.
Lady Thatcher said Mr Major would "have the support of all of us who wish to see these dangerous and damaging proposals resisted, and the present trends reversed, as he argues Britain's case at the forthcoming intergovernmental council."
But Mr Major was left last night knowing that his predecessor had rendered still more difficult his task of holding his divided party together on any agreed approach to the IGC.